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A Great Nation
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Yeah, because we're the Great Nation, the Super-Duper Power.
Is that why we--and our great ally, Israel--are trying to "remake" the Middle East?
What a great job we're doing! A great nation. Iraq is in flames, government power--to the extent there is any--is in the hands of Iran-sponsored groups who are complicit in the civil war on the Shiite side; al Qaeda has a field day recruiting on the Sunni-side, and bombing to its heart's content; the Sunni Saddam diehards and the Sunni nationalists have all the weapons they possibly need to fight us and the Shiites indefinitely, since Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army but didn't disarm it; finally, the Kurds are, at very least, not stopping Kurdish nationalists from attacking both Iran and Turkey, since both suppress their Kurdish populations.
Oh, and Shiites in other nearby countries--Saudi Arabia and Bahrein--are becoming restive by seeing the majority Shiites apparently victorious in gaining government power in Iraq, the central state of the Arab nation.
I haven't even mentioned Lebanon yet. The Great Nation has encouraged its client, Israel, to attack Lebanon--with the idea of solving a political problem once and for all with massive military force. Solving political problems with outside military force virtually never works. Besides, what political problem? Remember Lebanon's elections? "Truly democratic," part of a new "democratic trend" in the Middle East: does anybody remember that the election was only this January?
Remaking the Middle East is the kind of thing a great nation and especially a super-duper power should do all the time. See how successful we've been in stabilizing the region by invading Iraq and throwing out its monster dictator: Saddam?
Does anyone care to remember that Saddam was our ally, that Reagan and Bush's daddy collaborated with Saddam, gave him arms, shared intelligence--he was our guy to stop the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranians who staged a revolution to throw out--American influence!
Yes, remember that, too. We installed the Shah in Iran after overthrowing a popularly elected slightly socialist government. We funded the Shah, controlled his oil, armed him--and thoroughly discredited the United States and secular democracy in Iranian eyes.
So, the only superpower can intervene all over the globe, but its interventions only seem to make things worse wherever it goes.
The US doesn't really have control; no one does, or should. Only in extraordinary circumstances can a nation be instrumental in remaking other nations; that happened after World War II, but do we have to have World War III? Now?
Oh, I forgot. Some people make extraordinary amounts of money on these wars. The Bush family has made money on wars since World War I, Cheney much more recently, by being CEO of the military contractor, Halliburton. Collectively, the Bushes may be worth close to a billion, if W's Daddy is considered, but Cheney himself is worth at least $30 million, perhaps as much as $100 million, just because he did a rather poor job of running Halliburton--but had phenomenal contacts. And then there are people like the new political entrepreneurs Custer Battles, and Joseph Schmidt and Erik Prince of Blackwater security, raking in millions in non-bid contracts with the government--just because the US is a "great nation."
Look at the effect of Empire on the Romans, the great nation of the day. A few, mostly nobility, became extremely wealthy, while many were impoverished and the peasants were driven from their land. Same thing happened in the British Empire. Why else do you think the nobility built those huge palaces that tourists troop through every summer? And the peasants? They ended up in the factories, where they were paid starvation wages--or, if they were lucky they joined the military and had "a career." Most people in empires, even in the home country are not better off for a long, long time; this was true even in Britain. In Rome, things got worse, except that a hundred generations of proletarians had nothing to do but collect the dole and go to the free games and baths.
What do you think happened when the dole stopped? People died, population fell. It stopped because the government became physically incapable of collecting the meat and oil, etc. It was unable because the bureaucracy was run by--and for--the wealthy, whose only concern was the protection and enhancement of their own fortunes, the fortunes their forebears had "earned" in the imperial gains of Rome, the "Great Nation" of the day.
They ran the government, but they had no interest in running it well enough so that the poor might flourish--think Katrina. In fact, their interest was just the opposite: to insure that their own power and wealth was unassailable. Empire had enhanced their status many-fold compared to the ex-peasants who camped out in cities because they had been starving in the countryside. For more information on how
the wealthy gain power, click here.
On how being "a great nation" creates incompetent government, click here.
It is greed, and a drive to overpower that motivates the rulers of a truly great nation, a super-duper nation. But the fact of super-duper-ness, does not mean it can, or should control even one other country. In fact super-duper-ness is a blight on the country that claims it, and on every part of the world it touches: like Lebanon, like Iraq, like Afghanistan, like Iran….
